Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels

novelwriter.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 277 posts

Re: NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels

#181

Post by eslaught »

michaericalribo wrote: post #91
vikingcaffiene wrote: post #88

This has no word export option (unless I missed it) which makes it infeasible for a lot of writers. Like it or not, docx is the format a lot of folks in mainstream publishing expect. Context: My partner is a published author and I've pitched stuff like this at her on multiple occasions as an alternative to Scrivener. In addition to her laughing at my insistence that markdown is a superior way to write, she cites the…

Just to add here, the question is not “is markdown (or tex or binary strings or...) better”, but “can the person who determines whether I get paid open the file?” The fiction publishing world is cutthroat competitive. Trying to use nonstandard tools / “breaking the mold” adds even more friction to success.

I will find out the answer to this question hopefully later this year. :-)

But anyway, I do use Markdown and I have submitted to contests etc. that require Word formatted files. For the most part it's an nonissue. I can use Pandoc to export to Word, provide the reference file with the correct format, and boom, I'm done. None of the judges of my works so far have ever had any issues opening my files.

I agree the publishing industry will never accept Markdown. That's ok. I can use the tools I like and still produce what they need to do their part of the job.

Re: NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels

#182

Post by eslaught »

michaericalribo wrote: post #164
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an author and an software engineer. I can see why Markdown could be slightly better for a writer - but not much better - and honestly it seems like a step down for an editor. Primarily, all a writer does is write plain text. Probably less than 1% of sentences are anything other than plain text. There's not a lot of headings or titles. There's not a lot of italics or bold text. What else is there? What am I missin…

Ha! This is a really interesting perspective—I think you're saying, "it's all plain text, so there's no advantage to using Markdown instead of docx". I think others have an opposite view, but on the same grounds. The argument seems to be: it's all plain text, so docx is overkill, so markdown is more technically efficient! There's some benefit to using the tool I know best (emacs, for me), so it's nice to use a "nativ…

The benefit is the rest of the pure text toolchain. Like being able to use Git. I can confirm, for example, how long a typo has existed in my book by looking at the Git history. Maybe that's a bit academic, but you get the point. I have the complete history of everything I've ever written.

Another example: because formatting is reified in Markdown, I can grep for it. Did I misuse italics? With one command I can find every single place where I used italics in my entire book. I don't think you can even do that in Word. Good luck reading a multi-hundred page manuscript to find all of the places you may have made the same mistake.

Another example: Word provides styles, but honestly, who has discipline to use them? Most people I know manually insert page breaks, centered text, and X number blank spaces at the top of a page to make a new chapter. In Markdown, all of my markup gets converted into Word styles automatically and then I can create a reference doc to apply the style I want. I'm writing semantically correct styles in my documents all the time with no additional effort.

Re: NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels

#183

Post by socialdemocrat »

barkingcat wrote: post #125
vikingcaffiene wrote: post #88

This has no word export option (unless I missed it) which makes it infeasible for a lot of writers. Like it or not, docx is the format a lot of folks in mainstream publishing expect. Context: My partner is a published author and I've pitched stuff like this at her on multiple occasions as an alternative to Scrivener. In addition to her laughing at my insistence that markdown is a superior way to write, she cites the…

I agree with her - markdown is totally not a superior way to write. It's a good way to mark up text, but writing isn't just marking up text.

When writing you want a tool focused specifically on writing an organizing text. Programs like word is too focused on formatting and visual aspects.

Markdown would be much better for authors. Just because they have become accustomed to something else doesn’t mean that something else is better.

Just watching the mess my dad makes when writing books in Word makes me convinced that anybody who claims Word is superior for an author simply have never watched and author in action.

Re: NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels

#184

Post by jonnycomputer »

powersnail wrote: post #160
em-bee wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

publishers format for print, but the submission needs to be in a specific format too. this stems from the days where manuscripts were submitted on paper, and not electronically. one could argue that with electronic submission such format requirements are no longer relevant, but we all know that people don't like change. standard manuscript format looks roughly like this: lines are double spaced first line of each par…

These requirements seem to be easily within pandoc’s ability though, as it can use a reference docx file.

News to me, but in this case, I'm happy to be wrong.

Re: NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels

#185

Post by falcolas »

nix23 wrote: post #172
falcolas wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you too can afford to pay your editors, proofreaders, and publishers to accommodate your unique file formats and the associated changes to their workflow, you too can write in WordStar.

Since you obvious don't know what unix philosophy is, it's a md writer..that's it, you want to convert it..take a converter like pandoc. If you really think every writing program should have it's own converters..well then you end up with less interchangeable stuff. One tool for Writing another one for conversion..is that so complicated?

For a layman, err, editor? Absolutely. It's a completely different workflow than what they're used to.

The Unix philosophy has nothing to do with this, since we're not talking about programming, we're talking about writing.

Re: NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels

#186

Post by em-bee »

michaericalribo wrote: post #121
kleer001 wrote: post #68

Looks fantastic! But, too late for me. I'm writing a novel now in emacs' orgmode (spacemacs) with lots of customization. The killer app for me is orgmode's foldable hierarchies of text. Beyond that even typing speed isn't my main bottleneck, it's ideas and sitting down in front of the keyboard and actually typing.

> it's ideas and sitting down in front of the keyboard and actually typing This is the crux of the challenge for every writer. At least for me, I use "finding the right tool" as a way to procrastinate from actually writing...

i wrote my story in plain text in vim. when i was forced to convert to libre office in order to produce the format required for submission, editing became a pain, and i felt blocked from working on the story any further, since i no longer was able to just take any break i had to work on it.

not being able to use my preferred editor, i too ended up searching for a better solution...

Re: NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels

#187

Post by socialdemocrat »

michaericalribo wrote: post #91
vikingcaffiene wrote: post #88

This has no word export option (unless I missed it) which makes it infeasible for a lot of writers. Like it or not, docx is the format a lot of folks in mainstream publishing expect. Context: My partner is a published author and I've pitched stuff like this at her on multiple occasions as an alternative to Scrivener. In addition to her laughing at my insistence that markdown is a superior way to write, she cites the…

Just to add here, the question is not “is markdown (or tex or binary strings or...) better”, but “can the person who determines whether I get paid open the file?” The fiction publishing world is cutthroat competitive. Trying to use nonstandard tools / “breaking the mold” adds even more friction to success.

Geez 99.99% of a Nobel is just plain text. MS Word adds no value. Getting plain text into MS Word is not rocket science.

The point of using markdown is that you got many tools which are superior is aiding in you writing process and organizing your text.

The final format is much less important than whatever aids your writing process.

I have tried using traditional word processors for writing novels and I cannot say they measure up to tools like Ulysses.

Re: NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels

#188

Post by jonnycomputer »

em-bee wrote: post #147
powersnail wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pandoc is pretty handy. It's pretty much plain text anyway, whatever format is used.

yup, and here is how to use pandoc to convert to standard manuscript format: http://www.autodidacts.io/convert-markdown-to-standard-manus...

thank you for this.

huh. looks like i bookmarked this article for followup some time ago, and completely forgot about it.

Re: NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels

#189

Post by soferio »

Looks great. I would be delighted to have the small task of converting to docx when the big task of actually writing a novel is made easier by this and finished! (Also python has docx libraries so docx is unlikely to be too much trouble in due course). Well done!

Re: NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels

#190

Post by socialdemocrat »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #161
michaericalribo wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to add here, the question is not “is markdown (or tex or binary strings or...) better”, but “can the person who determines whether I get paid open the file?” The fiction publishing world is cutthroat competitive. Trying to use nonstandard tools / “breaking the mold” adds even more friction to success.

I'm an author and an software engineer. I can see why Markdown could be slightly better for a writer - but not much better - and honestly it seems like a step down for an editor. Primarily, all a writer does is write plain text. Probably less than 1% of sentences are anything other than plain text. There's not a lot of headings or titles. There's not a lot of italics or bold text. What else is there? What am I missin…

You just sold everyone on markdown. This is the whole point. All the crap MS Word adds to support formatting and visual styles is in the way. With markdown you focus on the actual text. Exactly what an author should want to.

What exactly does MS Word add over markdown which matters to an author? I am talking about the writing experience. You could always export to docx.

Post reply on HN